Coding 'till the morning light

Pushing hobbies forward

I don't earn money with programming, gamedesign, or talking about those two. But they are my hobbies, and I love doing all three. The main trap about hobbies is when they require labour. At some point, every project in the traject of completing needs tedious and boring work. For this reason I have a fridge full of unfinished projects. Many times I have forced myself not to start a new project again, because my conceptual fridge is too full already. But last month I stumbled upon a nice challenge that got me motivated to actually finish a project: the Ludum Dare -finish a game and bring it to the market- October Challenge! The challenge is already over, but that didn't stop me to accept it regardless.

I tried to keep the main idea of this game project as simple as I could (that's quite the challenge already!). You start in a star system with a civilisation that is about to take their first baby steps into interstellar growth. On this star you decide which steps into different kinds of technologies your civilisation will take. When you choose, new technologies will become available. However, one decision may cancel out others as well. Each choice grants you new abilities, resources, etc. to construct buildings, which in turn unlock new possible research and subsequent buildings.

At some point you may build a Hypergate. This allows you to colonize different stars that are linked to yours in the Local Cluster screen (see screenshot). Research on the new star will start all over again, allowing you to research and develop different paths you skipped on the previous star. The final goal is to reach and finish the last star in the Local Cluster. The faster, more efficiënt and more developped you finish, the higher your ranking. Your rank will be updated online, so you can meassure yourself against the rest of the world.

At the time of writing this post, I have released the first development screenshots. The basic programming framework and interface design stands, now on to extending and balancing the game!